They reached the junction with the road, only for the lights to turn against them. ‘Seems he loved you too,’ said Elias. ‘We found his will already. You get the lot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘When we were out on the farm, he’d sometimes tell me how it would all be mine one day. Anyway, we were each other’s only family.’

  ‘What about his in-laws? From his marriage?’

  ‘He’d barely seen them since her funeral. They thought their daughter was too good for him. And it’s called Warne Farm for a reason. He’d never have let it go out of the family, not if he had a choice.’ Anna hadn’t realised it at the time, but she’d come to believe since that this had been another reason why her mother had asked Dun to take her on. She’d always felt cheated out of her stake in the farm, and this had been a way to get it back, if only by proxy.

  ‘So you lived with him until you left school, yes?’ asked Elias. ‘Then what? University?’

  ‘Nottingham to read history and archaeology. York for my PhD.’

  ‘Why the switch?’

  She gave him a look. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I guess not.’ The lights went green. He turned onto the road. ‘So how’s it going? I hear doctorates can be a bastard.’

  ‘I study medieval history all day then I peel potatoes and chop carrots in a restaurant kitchen every night,’ she told him. ‘I don’t have time for self-pity.’ This was the first lie she’d told him. Away from work, all she did these days was lie on her sofa feeling sorry for herself. It had started, for some unaccountable reason, three or four months ago, on returning from the library with a bagful of books, only to be overwhelmed by such a profound sense of pointlessness that she hadn’t even been able to look at them, but rather had hidden them beneath a blanket in her cupboard before falling into a slump, paralysed by elusive fears of falling short.

  The library had emailed her three weeks later to tell her that their books were due. She’d taken out a different selection instead, only to hide those ones too. And so she’d carried on ever since, unable even to think about her thesis, let alone work on it. It was a dreadful way of life, but she hadn’t been able to admit to herself, let alone to Uncle Dun, that she was a kitchen hand now, not an academic.

  ‘You must get the odd evening off.’

  ‘Tonight’s my first since I was last down.’

  ‘So how do you get around? You have a car?’

  ‘No. A bike.’

  ‘But you can drive, yeah? You can borrow a car in a pinch?’

  Anna turned to gaze at him. ‘What are you really asking me, Detective?’ she said coldly. ‘Are you really asking me whether I borrowed a car last Sunday night to drive down here to murder my uncle for my inheritance?’

  Elias put on his indicator and pulled in to the side of the road, bumping wheels up onto the pavement. He popped his belt then turned sideways in his seat, the better to catch every nuance of her reaction. ‘Yes,’ he said bluntly. ‘I am.’

  THREE

  Small comfort for Anna that she now had compelling evidence of her innocence to show the obnoxious Detective Elias, what with one of her uncle’s likely killers racing towards her across the yard. Exoneration would be of little use if he found her already dead. She kicked off the gumboots, therefore, and slipped out of the waterproofs, then snatched up her keyring from the cobbles and splashed barefoot to the front door. The man was almost upon her. One fumble and she’d be done. Thankfully the latchkey was distinctive enough that she found it instantly. She fitted it in, turned it, slipped inside and slammed the door closed a moment before he crashed into it with his shoulder. She cried out as it shuddered, but it held well enough for her to shoot the top and bottom bolts before he could try again.

  She hurried through to the sitting room for the phone. She started dialling the emergency services only for the window behind her to explode as a brick was hurled through it to come rolling across the carpet and stop by her feet. She dropped the phone and ran upstairs. She reached her bedroom, closed its door and wedged her chair beneath its handle. She flipped on the lights for just long enough to find her bag. Crunching noises from downstairs as the men trod over broken glass. She turned on her phone. Her hands were trembling wildly. She had to tap in the number with her thumb.

  A creak upon the stairs. Then another. The passage lights came on, laying a thin yellow line beneath her door. A woman answered the phone in a disconcertingly calm voice. She asked which service she required. Anna whispered for the police. Doors opened and closed as the two men came hunting. Her own handle began to turn. She watched in horror as the door opened an inch or so before the chair legs bit into her fitted carpet. One of the men called out to his companion in an incongruously posh voice. The two of them then pushed against the door, forcing the chair back inch by inch.

  Anna went to help in its defence, phone clamped between shoulder and ear. A new woman came on, asked the nature of her emergency. ‘I need help,’ Anna yelled, there being no further point in whispers. ‘Two men are breaking into my bedroom right now. They murdered my uncle. Hurry! Hurry!’ She shouted out her address even as the door opened wide enough for one of the men to squeeze his hand through, feeling for the chair to pull it aside.

  Two years before, while walking back to her flat after a late shift at the Nottingham pub where she’d tended bar, Anna had been abducted by a bank clerk named Harry Kidd who’d been stalking her for months, despite her three separate complaints to the police, who’d done precisely nothing, other than for one of them to use her contact details to ask her out for a drink. She had no memory of the attack itself, for Kidd had coshed her from behind, so that the first she’d known of it had been on waking up with a splitting headache locked inside the boot of a moving car, her ankles and wrists taped together behind her back, with another strip of tape over her mouth to stop her from screaming.

  Perversely, this had quite plausibly saved her life, by preventing her from thrashing and yelling and alerting him to her revival. She’d had to think instead. He’d bound her feet and wrists behind her back with a single long strip of tape. She managed to pick up one end of it with a fingernail, after which it had only been a matter of time before she’d pulled it loose enough to free her hands and then her feet, and peel the tape off her mouth too.

  One of Anna’s duties at the pub had been to host its quiz night. By bizarre good fortune, they’d had a question several weeks earlier about emergency release levers in car boots. She’d looked everywhere for it, had been on the verge of despair when she’d found it beneath a flap of carpet. She’d forced herself to wait until they slowed for a junction. Then she’d pulled it to pop the boot and throw herself out, breaking her left wrist in the fall. To her despair, the road had been empty of other traffic. Kidd had screeched to a halt and reversed back up, his rear lights illuminating the road, and her upon it. She’d jumped a ditch then had fled blindly into some woods, before throwing herself down and hiding for hours beneath a bush while waiting terrified for dawn.

  Never again, she’d vowed. Never again. As part of her defences, she’d bought herself a chunky keyring fob equipped with both a rape alarm and a razor sharp box-cutter blade. She removed its safety cap and stabbed it down at the man’s hand, only for his black leather glove to prove tougher than she’d expected. He snatched back his hand before she could do him any proper damage, then he and his companion hurled themselves so violently at the door that they knocked the chair backwards and sent her sprawling to the carpet, banging her elbows so that she dropped both her key fob and her phone.

  The shorter and burlier of the two came in first. He looked terrifying. An Olympic weightlifter, with tree-trunk legs and a barrel chest that pushed his arms out wide, like a gunslinger on the draw. He turned on the light to check that the room was clear of threat, then stepped aside for his companion, tall enough that he had to duck his head slightly beneath the lintel. Beads of rain dripped from his black acrylic sweater and trousers as he walked towards her. They looked brand new, as though he’d bought them specially. He was so gaunt that his balaclava hung slightly baggily on him, giving her a glimpse of sunken cheek. She scrambled back across the carpet until she reached the wall and could go no further. She pushed herself to her feet and looked around. But the weightlifter was blocking the door and the window was painted shut, meaning that her brass Statue of Liberty bedside lamp was her only remaining resource.

  She ripped its plug from the wall, tore off its shade. She turned it around in her hands to use its weighted base for hitting with. Her phone was still on. The emergency services woman was shouting that two cars were on their way and would be with her in a minute. Bullshit. The nearest station was eight miles away down twisting country lanes. Ten minutes would be a miracle. She was simply trying to spook these men into leaving. It might even work, too, for the weightlifter tapped his companion on his arm. ‘Let’s go,’ he grunted.

  ‘Not yet,’ said the other, in his creepy patrician drawl. He took another step towards her then pointed his torch into her eyes, dazzling her and making her squint. He raised the blade in his other hand for her to see. Not a stiletto after all, but rather a large, flat-tipped screwdriver. He drew circles in the air with it, a wizard with his wand. Her heart pounded like a steam hammer. Her brain buzzed like a maddened hive. She tasted that ugly sharp metal at the back of her mouth, so that for a moment she was back in those woods again, her face pressed into the earth as Harry Kidd walked by. The memory paralysed her for a moment but then it gave her strength. Harry Kidd had meant to rape and kill her. But she was still alive while he was long dead, having hanged himself in his own stairwell to spare himself a trial, after writing her a despicably self-pitying note of apology too.

  She took an even firmer grip of her bedside lamp. She drew it back behind her shoulder like a baseball bat.

  One swing was all she’d get.

  She meant to make the most of it.

  FOUR

  Many years ago now, before joining the police, Detective Inspector Ben Elias had been an up-and-coming amateur light middleweight boxer with dreams of the big time, more than a little swollen-headed at being the youngest member of the UK & Northern Ireland’s podium squad in training for the Olympics at Sheffield’s Institute of Sport.

  The trials had arrived. He’d been put up against the man who’d ultimately gone on to represent the nation at the Games, where he’d lost a heartbreaker of a semi-final against the Cuban gold medallist. The trial had gone great for a round and a half, with Elias jabbing and moving, bobbing and weaving and all the rest of that good stuff, using his long reach, fast hands and dancing feet to put himself so far ahead on points that he’d got complacent, he’d got cocky. Then the bastard had feinted left and smacked him with a right cross that he simply hadn’t seen coming, and from which he’d woken on the mat some twenty seconds later.

  He’d rather lost the heart for boxing after that.

  The ghost of that wretched day haunted Elias still, every time he screwed up on a case. Which was to say, it haunted him a lot. Yet he didn’t resent it. On the contrary, he welcomed it. It helped him work harder and it kept him humble too.

  A peacock strutted out into the road ahead, pecking at spillage from a grain truck. He allowed it a few moments before tooting it from his path. A little further on, he had to stop again, this time for a stray lamb bleating miserably for its flock, even though Elias could see them grazing on cauliflowers in the next field. Crates of muddy potatoes and other produce were for sale by the side of the road. Haystacks gleamed golden from last night’s storm. The air smelled of rot and rain. It was harvest time in rural Lincolnshire, and how he hated it, particularly on these back roads, constantly getting stuck behind combines, produce trucks and the rest, just as he now came up behind a hedge-cutter spraying twigs and leaves across the narrow lane, forcing him to slow down again, stressed by his lateness though he already was.

  Elias worked for Lincolnshire Major Crimes, part of the East Midlands Special Operations Unit. His department was always understaffed, but lately it had become ridiculous, thanks to a combination of holidays, sick leave and an exploding caseload, with the county’s villains all deciding to go on a spree. In just one night, they’d had a strangling in Boston, a murder-suicide in Scunthorpe and a fatal bar-fight in Lincoln. Then, to cap it all, a smouldering gang war in Grimsby had burst into violent flame, with a pair of tit for tat killings and the malicious wounding of the heroic young schoolmistress who’d tried to intervene, and who was now on life support.

  Enough had been enough. Lincolnshire’s Chief Constable had ordered Elias’s new boss Trevor Wharton to sort it out. Characteristically, Wharton had made a virtue of necessity, putting on his dress uniform to hold a press conference outside Grimsby Town Hall with the local MP and North Lincolnshire’s Mayor. He’d pounded the podium and declared that this was now his personal top priority, vowing to dedicate whatever resources it took to bring the perpetrators to justice and eradicate the scourge of knife crime from the town once and for all.

  The hedge-cutter pulled into the side to let Elias pass. He enjoyed a mile or so of clear road before, to his exasperation, he came up behind a tractor hauling a trailer of Halloween pumpkins, shedding mud and stones from its huge wheels that his own tyres spat up against his undercarriage.

  No one had yet known it while Wharton was giving his press conference, but Dunstan Warne had already been dead by then, killed – according to their pathologist – in the early hours of Monday morning, then buried in a corner of his own field. It was the kind of case that Wharton would normally have grabbed, what with its sympathetic victim and all the opportunities for holding press conferences and making public appeals; but he’d trapped himself and his top team in Grimsby with his overblown rhetoric, so he’d had to assign it to Elias instead, the only murder detective with any capacity at all, thanks to his being so out of favour.

  He’d made a solid rather than a spectacular start, seconding a team of uniformed local officers to search for the murder weapon and go door-to-door for witnesses, none of whom had seen anything themselves, but many of whom had pointed fingers at a smuggling gang widely rumoured to use this stretch of coast to bring in product. It made sense. The shore here was fringed by salt marshes on which even a small boat might founder. Except at Warne Farm, that was, where the marsh was held at bay by the outpouring of fresh water from the River Nene. On a calm night, with a high tide and decent moonlight, a smuggler could bring an inflatable right up to the seawall with minimal chance of being seen.

  The tide had been high last Sunday night. The sea had been calm and the sky clear. Perfect conditions for a shipment. And everyone agreed that Dunstan Warne had been a tough old bird, the last kind to tolerate smugglers taking liberties on his patch. So a consensus had emerged that he’d had enough. Maybe he’d sat up that night, or he’d been woken by a noise and decided to go check, setting off in his van to intercept them along his drive, grabbing a spade as a makeshift weapon to go confront them, only for his killer to wrest it from him, turn it sideways and bring it down like an axe upon his head. Then they’d buried him right there in the field, no doubt intending to return his van to the farmyard so that his body wouldn’t easily be found, only to realise too late that they’d buried his keys with him. It would likely have been getting light by then, leaving them no choice but to flee, taking the spade with them to dump elsewhere. It had all fitted together very neatly – or at least it had, until their return last night. And how to explain that?

  He reached Warne Farm at last, speeding up its long drive in a forlorn effort to make up time. The cobbled courtyard was still a mess from last night’s storm, muddy and covered by leaves and other detritus. A pair of squad cars and a blue Scene Of Crime van were already parked by the farmhouse door. He added his Leaf to their number then wiped his feet and went inside. There were muddy bootprints on the carpet, along with yellow evidence markers. He stepped carefully around them. Frank Mason, his Crime Scene Manager, was going about his business at the top of the stairs, along with two assistants. He called up to let them know he’d arrived then made his way through to the kitchen, where a uniformed woman police constable was sitting at the table with a mug of milky coffee, tapping away at her laptop.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Who are you?’ she retorted, taking off her headphones, jacked into a police recording device.

  ‘Detective Inspector Elias,’ he told her, showing her his warrant card.

  ‘Oh.’ She half rose to her feet in apology. ‘WPC Maria Quinn, sir.’

  ‘Quinn,’ frowned Elias. ‘You’re the one who found Warne’s body, aren’t you?’

  ‘One of them. Yes, sir.’

  ‘You left before I got here.’

  ‘We do have other duties.’

  Elias nodded. It had become his habit, as a detective, to make swift appraisals of people he met. Their height, build, looks, complexion, clothes, hair, ethnicity, accent, tattoos, marital status and the rest, all filed securely away for future retrieval. Quinn looked maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. She had bright red hair and pale freckled skin that made her look a little soft, along with a glint in her eye that invited him to try it and find out. Her uniform was freshly pressed; her shirt neatly ironed. These assessments were automatic and strictly impersonal, yet he still felt a small but undeniable pang when he saw her wedding ring. Not for the first time either. There’d been that new waitress in his favourite Nettleham café, and then Anna Warne at Peterborough Station. Anna Warne, for Christ’s sake, her uncle just murdered and herself a suspect. She’d noticed too, and had given him an old-fashioned glare, provoking him into needless hostility. And now Maria Quinn gave him an equally disapproving look. ‘So last night,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Any trace of the intruders when you arrived?’